Gender Budgeting is a tool for mainstreaming gender perspective at various stages of planning, budgeting, implementation, impact assessment and revisiting of policy/programme objectives and allocations.
In 2005, India started releasing a gender budget along with its Union budget. The gender budget is an exercise that applies a gendered-lens to the allocation and tracking of public funds. The focus is on improving women’s welfare through government policies. But a look at data reveals that, even now, the gender budgeting exercise faces issues, and that gender budgets are still away from realising this objective.
The gender budget in India comprises two parts: Part A encompasses schemes that allot 100 per cent of the funds for women (such as maternity benefits). Part B consists of schemes that allocate at least 30 per cent of funds for women (such as the Mid-Day Meal scheme). Since its initiation, the gender budget has increasingly been dominated by Part B. This implies that wholly-women specific schemes do not form the majority of the gender budget as of now.
Requirements
Firstly, the gender budget does not take into account some of the major schemes that benefit women. For instance, the Jal Jeevan Mission (JJM) aims to provide household tap connections to all rural households by 2024. Tap water can particularly improve women’s quality of life because it is mostly women and girls who gather water in households that do not have regular water access. Yet, none of the allocations in the JJM have been reported in the gender budget. For instance, the Pradhan Mantri Awaas Yojana (PMAY) accounted for 13 per cent of the gender budget in 2021-22 and was placed in Part A of the GRB because the scheme encourages houses to be owned by women and thereby might benefit women. On the other hand, only a third of the funds allocated under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) accounted for Part B of the GRB, despite women being 55 per cent of MGNREGS workers.
In terms of methodology, lack of a transparent mechanism that details weights attributable to various schemes for furthering gender equality could be one explanation for this paradoxical allocation, wherein a scheme that evidentially targets and benefits women (MGNREGS) is placed in Part B, while gender-neutral scheme, is placed in Part A.
The gender budgeting exercise thus does not seem to fully take into account prevailing gender dimensions (for instance security issues of women) as they play out in society, and leaves space for errors.
Despite some of its shortcomings, GBS is still an institutionalized tool that has allowed policymakers to assess how much the government spends on women’s empowerment, and is a reflection of India’s sincere efforts towards achieving its gender equality goals. It is because of a tool like GBS that civil society organizations and women’s rights activists are able to pitch for greater expenditure for women. At the same time, there is also a need to revisit our approach from time to time, and tailor our budgeting practices to suit the emergent needs and trends.
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